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Two years ago I spent Christmas in the hospital. Every day, my friends drove in from the city to visit. They brought Uniqlo underwear and turtlenecks. Poetry. Vogue magazine. We’d sit in the dining room and hold hands. I was lucky to receive visits, to bask in kinship forged by choice rather than by blood or obligation. Even now I am amazed by the simple existence of this memory—however brief our visiting time we could be together. “Is she your mother?” a nurse later asked me. “No, they’re my friend,” I said, like someone falling in love at first sight.

Ours of course was of our making. Living with people is political. Making collective living possible is political. When I say we take care of each other this means following through on gestures, whether it’s cooking a household meal for folks feeling down, fixing the pesky bathroom door, having ongoing conversations about racial capitalism and ableism, or addressing points of conflict. That this intimacy can be sustained is because we are committed to sharing the emotional work of care.

A chosen family requires a language for forgiveness as much as one of resistance. In many cases, the relationships I’ve forged with my friends provide the kinds of nurturing our families at birth did not provide. Many of us came from homes that informed our cultural upbringing as first generation people of color but could not comprehend the parts of us that are queer, struggle with mental illness, or lead non-traditional lives. We did not totally repudiate the idea of family. Rather, we had to unlearn what we had been taught about family in order to model intimacy as a source of possibility in our everyday lives.

When I Grow Up I Want to be a List of Further Possibilities is a book that models this intimacy by betraying the family in an obvious sense: Chen Chen’s parents are imperfect and cruel. They make mistakes. They get sick. They are disappointed in their son, who in turn internalizes the disappointment of having failed as a son. On the first page, Chen declares, “I am not the heterosexual neat freak my mother raised me to be,” followed by the insistence: “I am a gay sipper.” His observation is flippant and funny but its tone emphasizes the emotional distance separating parental expectation from personal actualization.

Can you be both a good Asian son and queer? How will you make space for your diasporic angst and your desire to be loved? In a way, Chen’s refusal to answer becomes the groundwork for writing the poetry of potential. Potential is a leverage for imagining the possibilities that reality has withheld. In “Race to the Tree,” a three-part poem, Chen recalls running away from home in the middle of the night, an incident which involves a police search for him and ends with a broken foot when he slips, accidentally, from the tree. With each section, underlying motives and details unveil a portrait of a teenager alternately upset and amazed by the revelation that he just wants to be touched. Thinking:

how it would taste
to kiss, to be kissed, oh
moon, for a long time, for the time,
to be k-i-s-s-i-n-g in this
or any tree . . .

Chen takes comfort in his longing for a boy’s kiss, that tenderness lingering more fondly than the immediate family drama being staged: Chen’s mother slapping him because he has told her he is gay, him hitting her in reply, and his father “holding us apart / like the world’s saddest referee.” A few pages later, in a poem titled “First Light,” the more painful memories of the incident are recalled. Here, the intention behind his parents’ words is undoubtedly clear—his mother calls him her dirty, bad son, led astray by Western devils and his father says Get out, never come back.

Leaving is a powerful feeling. It is a release of grief, frustration, uncertainty. It activates the ongoing recognition that growth is a deeply visceral process. Senses acquire the otherworldly dimension of possibility, the fulfillment of prolonged intimacy. To taste the light. To kiss your lover instead of going out. To chase after madness. “Dreaming of one day being as fearless as a mango,” Chen writes in “Self-Portrait as So Much Potential,” even though “I’m no mango or tomato. I’m a rusty yawn in a rumored year. I’m an arctic attic.” On the page, there is something unabashedly exciting about being seen for what you do instead of what you represent.

Despite betraying “home” and “family” Chen remains open to the tenderness of the world. The most coherent moments in his collection are grounded in the shared intimacy of we. “We” is a pronoun that softly lingers, that prolongs and accommodates alternate forms of companionship throughout the book. “In New York we read Darwish, we write broken sonnets finally forgiving / the Broken English of Our Mothers” to “We loved green tea but often had / Orangina instead” to “Are we even built for peace?”

To escape for the pure adventure of it. To be weird, warm, and aimless.

By contrast, Eunsong Kim’s Gospel of Regicide depicts betrayal as it is driven by revenge. Under Kim’s rendering, betrayal is a politic, the mobilized resentment of white supremacy and neoliberalism. Anger is a framework and an agenda. By drawing strength from gendered emotions and forms of labor, the work’s impetus is to identify the tender spaces of radical life that we have learned to disguise out of fear and, alternately, self-preservation.

Such as gossip. In Gospel of Regicide, gossip is both petty and transformative. Passages register the disappointment of a speaker who resents falsely realized communities, who resorts to betrayal as an act of salvation. Kim writes:

traitors come prepared
traitors are more prepared than you are
you are nothing in contrast to the
poetry flooding inside the traitor’s flesh

In my circles, gossip was one of the few ways we could actually engage in critique, despite its petty nature. My friends and I gossiped because we did not know how to challenge without undermining the queer Asian community we had always wanted and believed to have finally found. Bound by solidarity to maintain a certain appeasement, we critiqued outsiders while internally, we practiced a flawed understanding of transformative justice that replicated the problems we swore to betray. What do you do? We witnessed toxic interpersonal relationships strain entire communities and stayed silent, we witnessed times when performative politics exacerbated existing power dynamics and stayed silent.

Amongst ourselves, we gossiped. Designating ourselves as petty relieved us of the social expectation to uphold solidarity, to ask Has there ever been solidarity? It let us say the ugly things we needed to say about people we knew whose infallible politics masked coercive behavior.

Gossip makes room for self-critique in a way blanket solidarity does not. The gossip’s mystique provides it a certain illegibility under capitalism within which bodies accordingly exchange their time and labor for the barest resources of survival. The gossip rejects the idea of working on or off the clock because she is always working. The gossip knows how to leak the scandal waiting to happen, she controls how and when the conversation happens:

so just that we’re clear in this deletion, if we don’t say your
name immediately, we don’t address you immediately

i will say your name directly at some point before i die

Gossips are neither liked for what they know nor for what they can expose. As Sara Ahmed has written, to name a problem is to become a problem for those who do not want to recognize the reality of the problem. For the traitor, naming is a radical gesture that refuses to remain reasonable. She who catalyzes revolution will be cast as the traitor.

In Kim’s writing, as in Chen’s, the traitor is the one who leaves. The one who says NO and pursues an alternative. Inaction is a worse fate than failure. Though she is “remembered only through their gossip their scorn,” the traitor knows how to spread dissent into the undercurrents of ordinary life. The act of gossiping is a precarious line of work because it is undervalued and feminized.

Kim writes,

i’ve been wanting to write an epic on treachery. The love it requires.
its militancy
…
i want to write an ode to her. And how becoming
her is the only goal in a resurrected life—

and

These are not confessions this is not a confession

They are a collection of revisions upon revisions that roam my
memories which means they

are utter lies and my only foundation

The fulcrum of the traitor’s work is memory. Memory as contractual. Memory as the faulty appendage against the automation of the world-as-is. When theory and politics become complicit in maintaining the status quo of inventory—“gramsci reference check. explanation of hegemony check. the importance of a love triangle check”—betrayal is a final act of love.

How do you be purposeful about who you betray? In their texts, Chen and Kim insist on naming the failures of literary representation. It is not enough to be seen. It is not enough to be loved. Inclusion is a fraught, alienating process. To speak out against respectability politics, neoliberal complacency, or institutional whiteness is an isolating experience. Chen: “I’d like to take the time to acknowledge here the real and brilliant Asian American poet who could have appeared in [The Best American Poetry 2015] instead of the appropriating and exoticizing white American poet who did appear.” Kim: “Imagine my surprise when I’m sitting in an artist lecture by an Asian American artist who at some point says that aesthetics and politics are separate. I write in my notes: Kant lover <3 <3 <3, whatever, you suck die.”

Poetry is the space in which becoming something other can be realized. Like community, poetry is a situation that has to be intentionally built. Sometimes you have to leave before you can begin. My friends and I, as co-conspirators, moved to a new city with this pursuit in mind. Community building is a collective undertaking, its shaping sustains the momentum of our voices in spite of: everything against us. More than survival, I want us to read to one another. I want us to betray the spaces that cannot accommodate us, that were never meant to. In our life, saying no is an act of tenderness.

Catherine Chen is a poet and performer. Her writing has appeared in Mask Magazine, Nat. Brut, Tagvverk, Web Safe 2k16, and Brain Mill Press. She lives in Atlanta.

Events

Join us to celebrate the launch of Marianna's Beauty Salon, Bushra Rehman's first collection of poetry. Rehman is author of Corona, a dark comedy on being South Asian American and co-editor of Colonize This! Young Women of Color on Today’s Feminism, one of Ms. Magazine’s “100 Best Non-Fiction Books of All Time.” This collection spans twenty years of poetic work. Rehman will be joined on stage by Quincy Scott Jones (The T-Bone Series), Sadia Shepard (The Girl from Foreign) and Jai Dulani (The Revolution Starts at Home.) DJ Rekha will close the night with a special music set.
RESERVE A SEAT!
$5 SUGGESTED DONATION | OPEN TO THE PUBLIC
Bushra Rehman grew up in Corona, Queens, but her mother says she was born in an ambulance flying through the streets of Brooklyn. Her first novel Corona was noted by Poets & Writers among 2013’s Best Debut Fiction and featured in the LA Review of Books as a work of notable South Asian American Literature. She co-edited the anthology Colonize This! Young Women of Color on Today’s Feminism, one of Ms. Magazine’s “100 Best Non-Fiction Books of All Time.” Rehman’s first Young Adult novel, the prequel-midquel to Corona is forthcoming from Tor/Macmillan. She. is creator of the popular writing workshop series for POC and allies: Two Truths and a Lie: Writing Memoir and Autobiographical Fiction.
DJ Rekha (born Rekha Malhotra) is a DJ, producer, curator, and educator. She has performed spaces across the globe including the inaugural Women’s March and Obama’s White House. Rekha has done remixes for artists that range from AR Rahman to Meredith Monk to Priyanka Chopra and curated events for Celebrate Brooklyn and Central Park Summerstage. You can hear her weekly podcast Bhangra and Beyond on www.btrtoday.com/listen/bhangraandbeyond
Jai Dulani is a writer and interdisciplinary storyteller. His work has appeared in SAMAR, bustingbinaries, Black Girl Dangerous, Teachers & Writers, and the anthology, “Experiments in a Jazz Aesthetic.” Dulani is co-editor of the anthology "The Revolution Starts At Home: Confronting Intimate Violence in Activist Communities." An alum of the Austin Project, Kundiman and VONA, Dulani has also been a BCAT/ Rotunda Gallery Multi-Media Artist-in-Residence and was a 2016 Open City Fellow through the Asian American Writers Workshop. He loves Bushra's writing, especially her poetry, and has been lucky to be her friend and student over the years.
Quincy Scott Jones’ first book, The T-Bone Series, was published by Whirlwind Press, in 2009. His work has appeared in the African American Review, The North American Review, African Voices, and The Feminist Wire, as well as the anthologies such as Drawn to Marvel: Poems from the Comic Books (Minor Arcana Press 2014), Resisting Arrest: Poems to Stretch the Sky (Jacar Press, 2016), Red Sky: Poetry on the Global Epidemic of Violence Against Women (Sable Books, 2016), and Black Lives Have Always Mattered: A Collection of Essays, Poems, and Personal Narratives (2Leaf Press, 2017). With Nina Sharma, he co-created the Nor’easter Exchange: a multicultural, multi-city reading series and is currently the Coordinator of the Writing Center at Grace Church School.
Sadia Shepard's first book, The Girl from Foreign, was published by The Penguin Press in 2008. Her other writing has appeared in The New Yorker, The Washington Post, Wall Street Journal Magazine and The New York Times. As a documentary producer, Shepard’s credits include The September Issue and The Education of Muhammad Hussain for HBO. She teaches at Wesleyan University and leads AAWW's Profile This! photography and creative writing workshop for Muslim, South Asian and Arab youth at the Arab American Association of New York.
This event is presented by the Asian American Writers’ Workshop, the South Asian Women’s Creative Collective, the Asian/Pacific/American Institute at NYU, and Poets & Writers through public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, in partnership with the City Council. This event will be livestreamed on the Asian American Writers’ Facebook page.
NOTE ON ACCESSIBILITY
*The space is wheelchair accessible. No stairs. Direct elevator from ground floor to 6th floor.
*We strongly encourage all participants of the space/event to be scent-free.
If you all have any other specific questions about accessibility, please email Tiffany Le at tle@aaww.org with any questions on reserving priority seating.
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Join us for a reading featuring two fiction writers whose memoirs about illness offer stories of survival, pain and transformation. Sick is Porochista Khakpour’s grueling, emotional journey — as a woman, as an Iranian-American, a writer, and a lifelong sufferer of undiagnosed health problems — through the chronic illness that perpetually left her a victim of anxiety, living a life stymied by an unknown condition. MacArthur ‘genius’ grant winner Yiyun Li’s Dear Friend, from My Life I Write to You in Your Life is a love letter to the books that have kept her alive through depression and an intimate portrait of an immigrant writer that asks why write, and why live? Don’t miss this event with two of the most remarkable voices in fiction on being made and making themselves, moderated by Elif Batuman.
RESERVE A SEAT!
$5 SUGGESTED DONATION | OPEN TO THE PUBLIC
Porochista Khakpour’s debut novel Sons and Other Flammable Objects was a New York Times Editor’s Choice, one of the Chicago Tribune’s Fall’s Best, and the 2007 California Book Award winner in the “First Fiction” category. Her second novel The Last Illusion was a 2014 "Best Book of the Year" according to NPR, Kirkus, Buzzfeed, Popmatters, Electric Literature, and many more. Among her many fellowships is a National Endowment for the Arts award. Her nonfiction has appeared in many sections of The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, Elle, Slate, Salon, and Bookforum, among many others. Currently, she is guest faculty at VCFA and Stonecoast's MFA programs as well as Contributing Editor at The Evergreen Review. Born in Tehran and raised in the Los Angeles area, she lives in New York City’s Harlem.
Yiyun Li is the author of four works of fiction—Kinder Than Solitude, A Thousand Years of Good Prayers, The Vagrants, and Gold Boy, Emerald Girl—and the memoir Dear Friend, from My Life I Write to You in Your Life. A native of Beijing and a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, she is the recipient of many awards, including a PEN/Hemingway Award and a MacArthur Foundation fellowship, and was named by The New Yorker as one of the “20 Under 40” fiction writers to watch. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, A Public Space, The Best American Short Stories, and The O. Henry Prize Stories, among other publications. She teaches at Princeton University and lives in Princeton, New Jersey, with her husband and their two sons.
Elif Batuman has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 2010. She is the author of The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them. The recipient of a Whiting Writers' Award, a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers' Award, and a Paris Review Terry Southern Prize for Humor, she also holds a PhD in comparative literature from Stanford University. The Idiot is her first novel. She lives in Brooklyn, NY.
This event will be livestreamed on the Asian American Writers’ Facebook page.
NOTE ON ACCESSIBILITY
*The space is wheelchair accessible. No stairs. Direct elevator from ground floor to 6th floor.
*We strongly encourage all participants of the space/event to be scent-free.
If you all have any other specific questions about accessibility, please email Tiffany Le at tle@aaww.org with any questions on reserving priority seating.
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